The 9-track album, All I Hear by deggy (me) was released on December 22, 2023. I spent about 5 months working on the album, figuring out how to actually use the equipment I bought, recording the vocals, working on the production, and scrolling through hundreds of sound effects until I found the perfect one for a song. Most of the time I was watching a YouTube video on how to troubleshoot a specific issue I would run into with the software I used, or running down to Musicians Pro Shop on Gilbert to have something fixed.
Overall, I don’t really love the album looking back on it. Here are the overall issues I had with the album.
The vocals were all recorded in my basement, meaning an echo sits underneath each vocal track from the reverb in my basement. The vocal doubles that I recorded were another thing that just didn’t work throughout the album. I often struggled with listening back to my lead vocal and not liking it, and instead of re-recording it, I would record a second and third vocal to harmonize with the first to make the initial bad recording “blend” in. The problem with this is that since the initial take was bad, the harmonies are just harmonizing with a bad take. It doesn’t sound better, it just makes the sound more muddy and the listener can’t even tell if the vocals are good or bad. They’re just hit with a wall of sound that’s too much to process simultaneously.
The opening song, All I Hear is my favorite, which is why I put it first. The lyrics have a lot of emotional meaning for me, but looking back on the final recording it sounds like I’m reading a script. There’s no emotion or feeling behind the lyrics and it makes it hard to connect with the song. The beat and hook are catchy, the harmony works in parts of the song, and the pitched-up ad-libs all sound solid on this song, but there’s just not enough vulnerability in the tone of my voice to make the listener feel anything.
The second song, Other Side of Yesterday, is a song I wrote while I spent part of my summer at an art camp in Vermont. As soon as I came back I used a $20 microphone to record the demo take (although the final version and demo take don’t sound too far off). It was definitely the fastest I’ve ever recorded a song because I had been thinking about recording the song for a month. I recorded the chorus and all three verses in one session. I sent the demo take out to a lot of my friends, and I think the reason the final version made it into the album was because of how much my friends loved the song. The song is repetitive and the final take has the same general recording issues like the entire album, but it’s still one of the songs I enjoy listening to the most off of the album.
The third song, Bring Me Home is another song like Other Side of Yesterday that was recorded without the intention of being on the album. Bring Me Home simply doesn’t fit on the album at all. Not only is the sound completely different than any of the other songs, the lyrics just don’t quite make sense. I recorded the song as an experiment to try harmonizing and layering vocals, and then I ended up really liking the song and playing it on my drive to work and school. I think it’s a pretty solid standalone song that’s reaching into its own genre of music, but it just doesn’t fit with the indie-pop feel of the entire album. I often find myself lowering the volume or skipping it when this song comes on while listening to the album.
The rest of the album continues in this cycle of the lyrics not quite making perfect sense, the vocal mixing being a little odd at some points, and the echoey sounds surrounding the lead vocals. You may be asking, if I dislike the album this much, why not just delete it off Spotify or stop pursuing music? Even though I dislike this album, it’s a place to start. I put in everything I had with the resources available to me, showed people, and have gotten feedback and helpful criticism to make future songs better. I don’t know if it’ll come down from Spotify, but it is nice to see how far I’ve come with making music since I released All I Hear.
